-By Warner Todd Huston
Now, this is the sort of thing that liberals do very well. They hide behind grand sounding organizations that claim to be “community” based, “non-partisan,” or but humble servants of the people. What they really are, however, are subversive organizations that try their best to stay behind the scenes while they promulgate their special brand of socialist policies. Most of all, they are massively funded by people like George Soros who have specific anti-American policies they wish to put into effect.
A new report from the Capital Research Center by James Dellinger and Karl Crow has recently been released to highlight the efforts of at least one of these back-room, secretive, leftist organizations.
In 2006, voters in 37 states faced a total of 203 state ballot initiatives and supporters and opponents of these measures raised and spent more than $350 million. Many ballot initiatives were sponsored and supported by labor unions, and often they received help from the little-known Washington, D.C.-based Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which quietly provides assistance in promoting ballot initiative campaigns in states where the initiative process exists. But the Center plays another increasingly important role for Big Labor and its allies. It devises tactics for blocking ballot initiatives by union opponents using aggressive methods.
Conservatives have seen success lately using ballot initiatives and this has caused liberals to try to subvert the process of ballot initiatives that their side has used to effectively for decades. This shows once again that the left is not interested in the democratic process… unless it is on THEIR side.
However, BISC is moving into a new area in 2008: It is using its expertise to thwart efforts by groups it opposes from making use of the ballot initiative process altogether. BISC has become the “go-to” group that Big-Labor relies on whenever it wants to organize a “blocker campaign,”a tactic unions use to restrict access to the ballot initiative process. The victims of these tactics argue that BISC’s abuse of the initiative process is a form of political thuggery that has no place in a democracy.
The CRC report details how this secretive, behind the scenes liberal group does more than merely promote liberal/union causes, but also “tracks the funding of ballot initiatives and tries to prevent conservatives from getting their initiatives on state ballots.”
This report is informative and really shows the sort of overwhelming odds that true community based citizen’s groups that attempt to use the democratic process have lined up to defeat them.
To get the full PDF report, visit Capital Research Center.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston